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International Southeast Asian Film Festival (I-SEA) 2015

The I-SEA Film Fest (International Southeast Asian Film Fest, Nov 21-22, 2015) highlights the histories, imaginaries and identities of those with ties to Southeast Asia and its diasporas. This year is the fortieth anniversary of US military engagements in Southeast Asia: the selected films seeks dialogue with local and international communities, drawing connections between wars then and now, overseas and on our streets. The films (9 features and 22 shorts) also query--and queers--standard national narratives of modern love, sexualities, and modernization.

The Opening night gala will take place on November 20th at Artist Television Access. The festival takes place at New People Cinema in Japantown from November 21-22nd, 2015--select screenings will have post-screening Q&A with filmmakers and panels. The I-SEA Film Fest is founded by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network.

California is the home to the largest concentrations of Southeast Asian immigrants in the world. There are hundred of thousands of people of Southeast Asian descent in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world. Southeast Asians are both invisible and hypervisible (as model minorities, gangsters, eternal foreigners) in North American mass media. These incredibly diverse Southeast Asian communities voice the ruptures--and re-envision global realities--forged by colonization, militarization and migrations. Providing counter-points to (hetero-)normative ideologies historically constructed by the West and by Southeast Asian nation-states, our Southeast Asian stories are varied and vital.

The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) started in 2007 with the mission to promote artists from the Vietnamese diaspora and foster their relationship to the Vietnamese American community in the Bay Area and beyond--nationally and internationally. Bringing together disconnected artists and audiences, DVAN’s mission is to enrich the Vietnamese American community, as well as the larger Bay Area community, through cultural programs that address Vietnamese American history, culture and traditions while providing support to artists of Vietnamese origin from different parts of the world. DVAN focuses on literature, films and visual arts. It regards storytelling, poetry and art as crucial empowerment and healing tools that foster constructive discussions and dialogues. In the last few years, DVAN started to support other Southeast Asian cultural productions of the diaspora.

By organizing this film festival, DVAN wants to demonstrate the global connections that bring such disparate groups of people together. We hope that this festival will inspire, empower and unify future generations of Southeast Asian Americans in the bay area.

Ina Adele Ray is a mixed-race Vietnamese and American (Scotch-Irish origins) filmmaker, video editor and educator. She has worked in film and video production in both the commercial and non-profit worlds as mainly an editor and producer for over 15 years to support her passion for filmmaking. Her recent television editing work includes 30, 60, and 90 minute programs about China and Chinese culture for D3 Productions, Inc. that have aired on PBS and CCTV. Her first film, El Paso Vietnam has won awards and screened nationally and abroad. Her current work-in-progress Ong Ba Ngoai(Grandparents) follows her grandparent’s lives spanning 3 wars and 3 continents. Adele has also served as a Part-time Assistant Professor, teaching film and media courses at the New School University and has also taught at NYU, Parsons School of Design, and Eugene Lang College. She currently teaches production courses at Berkeley City College. Ray is also founder of the East Bay Documentary Filmmaking Support Group that supports independent documentary filmmakers through monthly peer review sessions, workshops, and screenings which has been running since 2013.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a Professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (2011) and co-editor of Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (2014). Her academic work can also be found in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal,The Asian American Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and Mixed Race Literature. Her poems and prose have been published in Making More Waves, Tilting the Continent, Vietnam Dialogue Inside/Out and The Perfume River. Her art installations were exhibited at SOMArts Cultural Center, Driftwood Gallery and SF State University. She is the founder and co-director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), an organization that promotes Vietnamese cultural productions in the Diaspora.

As a graduate of the Asian American Studies graduate program, and English Education undergraduate program at San Francisco State University, Daphne has become an advocate for rewriting the narrative. Her background in literature and Ethnic Studies has helped to encourage her to push her students to rewrite their own narratives. Daphne currently works at San Francisco's Chinatown YMCA location, as an after school program leader at Jean Parker Elementary. In her spare time, she writes whatever is on her mind; the end result closely resembling poetry. The Southeast Asian Film Festival is the first project of its kind that Daphne has participated in, she is also new to DVAN.

Lisa Geduldig does freelance PR for arts, health, news, community organizations, politics... in both English and Spanish all over the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also a comedian and comedy producer. Her highly acclaimed annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy (Jewish comedy on Christmas in a Chinese restaurant), is now in its 23rd year and takes place Dec 24-26, 2015. www.SFPublicist.com and www.KosherComedy.com

Julie Thi Underhill is a photographer, filmmaker, visual artist, poet, essayist, historian, and performer. As a mixed-race daughter of the war in Việt Nam, she inherited an abiding concern for the consequences of not only that war but also other wars with high civilian casualties. In her historical and cultural work on the Chăm people from Việt Nam and Cambodia, she is interested in vocabularies of remembrance, amidst continuously remade notions of identity, belonging, and home. Julie has published her oral histories, photography, poetry, and essays in numerous journals and collections, including Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, positions: asia critique, Veterans of War Veterans of Peace, andVisual Anthropology. Julie attended The Evergreen State College (B.A.) and UC Berkeley (M.A.), where she’s taught for six years and where she is a doctoral student. In 2010 and 2012, she was the director of the biennial San Francisco Global Vietnamese Film Festival. She is currently a contributor and on the advisory board for diaCRITICS, a blog covering the arts, culture, and politics of the Vietnamese at home and in the diaspora, where she served as a managing editor from 2010 to 2013.

Dat Vu is an emerging photographer from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh), Vietnam. He graduated from Wesleyan University in May 2015, earning a BA degree with High Honors in Art Studio with a concentration in Photography. Currently he is living and working in the Bay Area, California. You can check out his works at www.datvu.xyz.

Vivian Chu was raised in San Francisco. She finds solace and inspiration in the arts. She developed a love for performance and writing in childhood and continues to infuse her weekly schedule with dance and movement. She believes that the arts play an important role in the healing and growth of marginalized communities. Vivian has worked in business administration for over 12 years and brings her experience in both the arts and administration to DVAN.